Hey all i just wanted to post about my bioactive set up, its been going for nearly 8 months now so i feel its fully established and going well.
Any feedback, comments, questions or constructive criticism are all welcome
Ill start from the top down I managed to find the plants lights on amazon UK. i think i paid £8.99 for them and they give the right red blue spectrum for plant growth with no UV or other properties in them so they don't affect my baby at all. I have them on a timer which i will probably change in the winter months giving half hour less at both the start and end of the day just to help mimic the seasons a bit more. The white lights are just LED strips I got from B&M and are only there for my visual pleasure i generally turn them off when I'm not at home and always at night.
To heat the vivarium I'm using a 150 watt ceramic bulb (I know i could get away with less wattage) its connected to a microclimate thermostat. It drops 1.5 degrees Celsius at 21:30 and back up again at 08:00 again to help mimic day and night.
Her top hide is a plant pot base i cut to size with an angle grinder and fixed with shelving brackets then used expanding foam PVA to seal it and brown mastic covered in coco husk and bark to give a finished texture. Also one of the vines is drilled through the vivarium in 3 places to secure it. The other vine is just wrapped around it and then buried in the substrate. There is also some bog wood sticking out of the substrate but that's behind most of the plants so you cant see it that well. the habba hut its screwed in from the outside of the vivarium as originally is wasn't and she did manage to more it away from the side. There are bits of cork bark and and pebbles in there just to get different textures.
The plants I have experimented with. I cant remember the names of most of them i did save them all but when me and my ex slit she binned a lot of my stuff and a lot of the receipts/snake stuff was in it :-(. most of the plants are pro-rep plants but the bonsai's mother in laws tongue and 2 different aloe plants aren't. I have found the pro-rep or terrarium plants have done best, but the ones i named are doing very well and have been there over 4 months if not from the start.
My clean up crew are springtails, tropical grey woodlice and earthworms. The springtails and woodlice are thriving they have set up home all over as for the earthworms originally there were 8 as I don't go digging around i couldn't tell you if they have died stayed the same or multiplied in there. They weren't in there from the start and have only been the for about 3 and a half months but after a month the plants did look healthier. Whether or not that's because of them i don't know.
The vivarium is a vivexotic medium maxi its 3 foot x 2 foot x 2 foot. I put a drainage layer in after the 1st month. (i did my research and originally decided not to put one in that quickly came back to bite me on the ass from over watering). I know have a soil tester to check the moisture levels of the substrate.
In total i think i must of spent getting close to £500 on this I'm not too sure though but i think that's a good guess. (not including weekly rat cost and the cost of my baby)
If you have any questions or want to know more or any comments (good or bad) please let me know
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